Macroeconomics

In the autumn of 1938, an internal memorandum was circulated among Reichsbank officials about the dire economic situation of Nazi Germany as a result of the frenzied rearmament policy through central bank monetary expansion. Warning against its inflationary effects, the memo suggested a “smooth landing” from a war to a peacetime economy. In the following months, seeing that instead of restraint there was a further acceleration of the armament race, Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht and the banks’ directorate decided to issue an official memorandum, which Schacht delivered directly to Hitler’s hands. Emphasizing that the Fuhrer himself had always “rejected inflation as stupid and senseless”, the letter stressed that “Reichsbank gold and foreign exchange reserves were ‘no longer available’”, that the trade deficit was “rising sharply” and that “price and wage controls were no longer working effectively”. With the volume of notes in circulation accelerating, state finances were bluntly described as “close to collapse”.

As Australia begins to plot a recovery strategy from the first recession in the country in decades, the Morrison government needs to examine what has worked well in the past.

Crises require strong leadership, national cohesion and a framework for carrying out recovery efforts on a grand scale.

As such, there is a case to be made for a new Commonwealth agency to lead the recovery effort, built on the model of the Department of Post-War Reconstruction that helped Australia emerge from the turmoil of the second world war.

In December 1942, Prime Minister John Curtin established the Department of Post-War Reconstruction. Even though the war was still raging, its task was to begin planning and coordinating Australia’s transition to a peacetime economy. 

The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey is a household-based panel study that collects valuable information about economic and personal wellbeing, labour market dynamics and family life. It aims to tell the stories of the same group of Australians over the course of their lives.

Started in 2001, the HILDA Survey provides policy-makers with unique insights about Australia, enabling them to make informed decisions across a range of policy areas, including health, education and social services.

As always with a Galbraith at the keyboard, this is a delight. Taken almost verbatim from the lecture mentioned below:

Twenty-five years ago, on a brilliant winter day at Alta, I skied off the top of the Sugarloaf lift and heard a familiar voice asking for directions. It was William F. Buckley Jr. I pulled off my hat and went over to say hello.  Buckley greeted me, then turned to a small man at his side wrapped in a quilted green parka topped with a matching forest green stocking cap and wraparound sunglasses in the punk style. “Of course,” Buckley said, “you know Milton Friedman.”

Last fall, when I received an invitation to deliver the 25th Annual Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture at Marietta College, my first act was to notify Buckley, already then quite ill. I warned that he couldn’t publish on it or the invitation might be revoked. The e-mail came back instantly, full of exclamation points, block caps, and misspellings. “Congratulations! What a wonderful opportunity to REPENT!”

Developing social workers’ capacity and engagement in collaborative community-based innovations to climate-driven and other environmental hazards better ensures progress on the Grand Challenges. Such inclusive solutions value community leadership and are culturally responsive and justice-centered. Multisolving, pioneered by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, offers a framework to pair social work goals from the Grand Challenges with climate-responsive interdisciplinary solutions by tackling multiple problems simultaneously with a single investment of resources. Exploring multisolving case studies that align closely with the Grand Challenge to create social responses to a changing environment, the authors consider collaborations and share experiences teaching courses and workshops that integrate multisolving into the social work curriculum and align with professional ethics to achieve these goals.

It's the RBA. It's statistics.

This Article works to debunk the myth of finance as intermediated scarce private capital and offers an alternative, more up-to-date theoretical framework for understanding the structure and operation of our financial system. We argue that, contrary to contemporary orthodoxy, modern finance is not primarily scarce, privately provided, and intermediated, but is, in its most consequential respects, indefinitely extensible, publicly supplied, and publicly disseminated. At its core, the modern financial system is effectively a public-private partnership that is most accurately, if unavoidably metaphorically, interpreted as a franchise arrangement. Pursuant to this arrangement, the sovereign public, as franchisor, effectively licenses private financial institutions, as franchisees, to dispense a vital and indefinitely extensible public resource: the sovereign’s full faith and credit.

This is  a  discussion  of how  best  to  reconcile  the demands  of War  and  the  claims  of private  consumption.